Crawling GCC Government Documents: What Blocked Me

Building GCC LexAI meant ingesting AI regulation documents from UAE and Saudi Arabia government websites. The tech stack worked fine. The websites did not always cooperate. Saudi.go.sa blocks non-Saudi traffic entirely This took me a while to accept as the actual explanation. cst.go.sa, cma.go.sa, sdaia.go.sa, and their subdomains return connection timeouts. Not 403s, not redirects - timeouts. I tried from Japan, Malaysia, and the US. Same result every time. The problem isn't the origin country; it's that Saudi government sites appear to block all non-Saudi IP ranges at the network level.